The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A system containing software or firmware, when shipped to end users, should include a COO. The COO lists all the software or firmware components, and the origin (developer or company) and the license associated with the components. The origin of the multiple software/firmware components may come from various location and various licenses (open source, proprietary). For example, a portable music player may include a small operating system, an audio codec, a graphical user interface (GUI), an audio player etc., each developed by different developers and sometime different vendors. Those components may vary between different embedded systems and between different versions of the same system. Accordingly, creating a COO manually is a tedious work that is time consuming and error prone.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.